Importing users

If your account has only a few users on it, setting them up by hand through the website is probably not a big deal. If you have a large number of users, however, this could be laborious and so Handshake supports uploading users via spreadsheet as well.

The basics

(required)email, firstName and lastName should be fairly self-explanatory.

(optional)group controls which user group this user will be in. Put the name of the user group here, or put the special value private to have the system create a private group for this user. If the group name that you specify does not already exist, then the group will be automatically created for you. If nothing is supplied, the user will be placed into the "master" group.

(optional)admin controls whether or not this user will be an account administrator and have access to all the setup features on the website. Put a 1 in this cell for administrators and a 0 for everyone else (this is the default).

Managing passwords

There are two columns in this spreadsheet that allow you to manage user passwords:

forcePasswordReset allows you to force the user to reset their password. They will be sent an email instructing them on how to set a new password. This is useful if you're setting up users for the first time and want them to choose their own passwords, or you suspect that your users have allowed their passwords to become compromised. A 1 in this cell forces a password reset.

password allows you to supply a password for the user. If you supply this field then the forcePasswordReset field is ignored and the password is just silently updated. Specifying a password is the only way to import a new user without them being sent an email, so this can be useful for setting up large teams ahead of time without spamming everyone on the team.

For new users, if you do not supply an explicit password value, the system will always force a password reset for them (i.e. act as if you had specified a 1 for forcePasswordReset).